Thai democracy and the October (1973–1976) events

Abstract

Thai Democracy: Three Decades After October 14 (in Thai) edited by historian Charnvit Kasetsiri (2003 Charnvit, Kasetsiri, ed. 2003. Thai Democracy: Three Decades After October 14 (Sam Thotsawat 14 Tula kab Prachatipatai), Bangkok: Foundation for the Promotion of Social Science and Humanities Textbooks Project. (In Thai.). Public Lectures Open University Series, [Google Scholar]) offers an entrée into understanding how Thailand’s 1970s social movements and state violence register in current politics and Thai historiography. The anthology was put together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the October 14, 1973 uprising, which led to the temporary exile of the past military regime. The contributors are varied across the academic disciplines, with speeches and newspaper articles by public intellectuals, politicians, and poet/writers. Those in Thai and Southeast Asian Studies will find this an invaluable resource. For those who do not read Thai, the VCD provides two English subtitled documentaries produced by Charnvit Kasetsiri. One features the historical events and the other is a walking tour of the numerous landmarks of the October 14, 1973 uprising.     

Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Edited by Mark Freeman and Gillian Nelson

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to place the debate about affluent working-class people in the inter-war and post-war periods within the broader context of long-term economic and social change. It explores why important structural changes were ignored for a long time, and how they came into view as the focus of professional social inquiry shifted following the Second World War, only to be reconceptualized as a new ‘social problem’ in the politically driven controversy about ‘affluence’ in the late 1950s. The article argues that we need to pay more attention to the gulf between official and vernacular understandings of social class in twentiethcentury Britain, drawing a distinction between everyday usage and professional languages of class.     

State Practice,Nationalist Politics and the Hunger Strikes of the Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929–39

ABSTRACT

This article examines the hunger strikes of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, a small group of revolutionary prisoners in India's jails in the midst of the nationalist movement. It examines the everyday practices of the state and demonstrates that the legal powers and medical duties designed to guide prison administrators in fact provided room for individual officers to improvise non-standard means of causing prisoners physical distress in order to end the strike. In these daily encounters, the prisoners adapted novel forms of resistance to meet each new technique. The second purpose of this article is to explore the reasons why their hunger strikes brought these men to the forefront of India's nationalist movement. It is argued, that although many members of the Indian National Congress were ambivalent about these revolutionaries, Congressmen nonetheless used the patriotic sacrifices of these prisoners to mobilize ordinary Indians for the nationalist cause.     

‘The Supposed Paradise of Pen and Ink’: Self-education and Social Mobility in the London Public Library (1880–1930)

ABSTRACT

Borrowing from prosopography, collective biography, sociology and genealogy, this article describes the ‘bookish’ workplace experiences of 90 chief and deputy public librarians to revisit debates around the upwardly mobile metropolitan lower middle class in the long nineteenth century. It finds that the border between the manual and white-collar classes was more easily (and enduringly) breached than previously supposed. It also suggests that those moving from the former group to the latter retained elements of their ‘working class’ origins and character across the late-Victorian period. These discoveries complicate historical assessments of the lower middles, but support sociological surveys that propose more fluid and open class borders from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Rethinking the coming home alternative: hybridization and coming out politics in Hong Kong’s anti‐homophobia parades

Abstract

In calling for the need to think about sexuality globally, scholars have given increasing attention to the historical specificities of local contexts. The return to the local, however, may not always be fruitful when the local and the global or the Western and the non‐Western are seen as binary opposites rather than permeable constructs. This paper examines the coming home/coming out controversy and calls into question the understanding of coming home as local resistance against global queering. It instead suggests the possibilities of cultural hybridity and blending of coming out and coming home. Using the First and the Second International Day Against Homophobia Hong Kong Parades as an example, this paper elucidates the complexity of cultural production in the interactions of the West and Non‐West, with attention on the effect of transnational mobility of political rhetoric and tactics.     

The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

Abstract

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.     

HOMEless: a case study of private/public inversion and the temporal–spatial exclusion faced by migrant domestic workers

Abstract

This paper is a case study of the shutdown of HOME (the House for Migrant Workers' Empowerment), a cultural and service center for migrant workers. HOME was founded by the Taipei City Labor Bureau (TCLB) and subcontracted to TIWA (the Taiwan International Workers' Association) in 2002, when the Director of the TCLB was the former labor activist Zheng Cun‐qi. For migrant domestic workers, the distinction between sold‐time and free‐time (i.e. the work–rest distinction) is blurred. Most of their supposedly private reproductive activities are temporally squeezed into holidays and spatially forced into public places where they are exposed to the scrutiny of the Taiwanese. This peculiar situation of private/public inversion not only results from, but also serves to reinforce, racial discrimination and class inferiority in their workplace (i.e. the homes of their employers). I use the concept of ‘bracketing’ to describe the spatial‐temporal strategies used by migrant domestic workers against this distorted inversion. I also analyze how employers ‘counter‐bracket’ migrant worker subjects as a counter strategy. HOME once existed as a ‘surrogate home’, providing shelter for migrant workers and allowing them to retain privacy during their days off. TIWA conducted organizing‐oriented cultural and political activities to assist the migrants in forming their own community, and challenged the spatial hegemony of real estate owners in the ChungShan District. However, when Yan Shang‐luan, a well‐known feminist labor research professor, took over the directorship of the TCLB in 2004 Taipei City Labor Bureau. 2004. “‘Minutes of the meeting for the analysis, review, and evaluation of administrative efficiency at the House for Migrant Workers' Empowerment’ ‘’”. 26 August [Google Scholar], she did not appreciate the function of HOME, and decided to close its doors. In analyzing the official rhetoric in the documents of the TCLB, I find that their decision to shut down HOME was a result of their middle‐class temporal‐spatial ‘habitus’. The shutdown became a counter‐bracket measure, which coincided with the real estate interests of the ChungShan local elites.